The beer was getting to the men, and they could not walk a straight line. John turned to Kari and said, “Walk down the river with me.”
She had no choice but to obey.
“Take off your stockings,” he said. “So you can go wading.”
Kari felt stark terror. She didn’t want to do that, fearing that he was preparing to rape her again. She made excuses and managed to coax him back to where Mike was drinking beer.
“I kept handing them cans of beer,” she recalls. “Trying to get them drunker.”
John said he had to go to the bathroom again, and Kari said she wanted to go, too. They had quite a long walk to the rustic restrooms.
Without being obvious, Kari looked out of the corners of her eyes to see who else might be in the campground.
This was her last chance. She knew it in her heart.
• • •
While deputies and CHP officers were stationed outside the Western Union or patrolling the very roads over which they’d traveled, none of them had spotted Kari Lindholm and her captors. They didn’t know that her Ford Granada had been dumped hours ago, or that they should be on the alert for a red and white Thunderbird.
Now John waited outside the women’s restroom for a while, apparently wondering if he could trust Kari. She watched him through a window inside. She could see that he stumbled as he moved to lean against a wall. Neither of them had had any sleep the night before, but she wasn’t drunk, and every synapse of her brain was working well.
She went over to one of the stalls and slammed the door loudly—but she didn’t go in. When she moved silently back to the window, she saw John entering the men’s side.
Looking beyond him, Kari saw several men dressed in hunting clothes who were sitting at a picnic table. They had guns beside them. After all the stops they had made where there were only women clerks, finally, there was someone who could protect her. John had a knife—but he didn’t have a gun—and he wasn’t close enough to stab her.
Kari made up her mind.
She walked out of the restroom without looking back and headed toward the picnic table where the hunters sat. Her back prickled with fear and she picked up speed, running toward the strangers. John still had the knife, and he was very drunk. Would he be so angry and frustrated that he might throw it at her? Adrenaline coursed through her body. The men who might rescue her seemed a long way away, but they were really quite close.
“I’ve been kidnapped,” she cried. “Please help me!”
The startled men stared at her, their mouths dropping open. For a second, Kari wondered if they were going to turn away. She heard John slamming the restroom door, and she whirled. He walked toward them, and she saw that familiar look on his face—the “charmer,” the man who believed he could talk his way out of anything. He must have his knife tucked up his sleeve.
“That’s one of them,” she said to the men. “Please. Please—I don’t want to go with him.”
Would they believe her? She knew that often strangers didn’t want to get involved. They might think she was crazy—or that she’d been drinking.
And then one of the hunters—a middle-aged man— stood up, and he cradled his rifle in his hands, letting John see that he was armed.
“I don’t believe the lady wants to go with you. I think you’d better leave,” he said, standing between Kari and John.
John paused for a moment, stared at Kari, and then shook his head. He turned and walked back hurriedly to where Mike waited with the Ford Thunderbird.
Richard Bessey, his son, John Bessey, eighteen, and Alan Kramar—all from La Mirada—quickly surrounded Kari and led her to their vehicle. They didn’t know the circumstances, but she looked exhausted and as if she was in shock. She wore no shoes, and her clothing was wrinkled. They might be interfering in a domestic situation, a family fight, but they had seen the terror in the young woman’s eyes, and they weren’t going to leave her there.
As they headed out of the campground, Bessey saw that the suspects’ car was right behind them. Both vehicles headed toward Highway 49, but the men in the Ford didn’t try to stop Bessey’s truck. When they reached the road, Bessey turned left toward North San Juan, and the red and white Thunderbird turned right and headed northbound on 49—toward Downieville.
• • •
It was close to one in the afternoon when Kari and her rescuers walked into the S&C Market. The same woman was behind the counter, and she pointed toward a phone on the wall when they said they had to call the sheriff. When they reached the dispatcher at the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office, Deputy Mike McPeters was dispatched to meet them at the North San Juan store.
McPeters asked Kari what had happened to her, and if she was hurt. She told him she had been kidnapped and raped. And, yes, she could describe the men who abducted her and she was ready to give a statement. She didn’t quite believe that she had survived her time with two dangerous, drunk, half-delusional men. But she had. She looked at the clock behind the counter. It was 1:37 P.M. on Sunday.
“Please let my husband and my mother know,” she said to McPeters. “And tell my friends at Sancho Panza that I’m okay. Tell them I made the 2:00 P.M. call, with some time to spare.”
Although Kari tried to hold herself together, McPeters could see that the disheveled woman was extremely upset, and she trembled as she tried to give him a preliminary statement.
Kari was in shock, and she had trouble remembering the order of the events that had begun the night before. Her captors had rambled here and there, retracing their travels, threatening to kill her if she didn’t get money for them. The weird visit to Mike’s mother’s house out in the countryside was her most recent memory, and she had had a sense of doom about that. Mike so clearly hated his mother that she wondered if it would have been enough for him to introduce Kari as his wife? Or would he have ended up hurting both her and his mother? She had a better fix on John; she had even begun to predict what would set him off—but Mike had been somehow more frightening. His silence and the way he had spoken to Shelly when he was tying her up was more chilling than John’s open threats.
“The knife might have been a Buck knife,” Kari told Deputy McPeters. “It was long when it was open—probably eight or nine inches long. He always had it in his shirt sleeve—or his jacket sleeve.”
A mile the other side of the Indian Valley Restaurant, a woman was driving at the speed limit when a red car came up behind her so fast that she thought it was going to rear-end her car. She sped up to stay ahead of it, but the other driver just went faster. She knew the road well, and worried about the many sharp curves ahead. If they met another car, they would all be dead. She looked for a wide spot where she could get over to the shoulder and let them pass. She found one just in time as they were trying to edge her off. The two men in the car waved to her in thanks as they sped past.
She saw someone in the car ahead throw a bag out of the window, and then the Thunderbird disappeared.
Now she saw a CHP officer heading toward her, and a few miles up the road she saw a sheriff’s car making a U-turn, and heading in the direction of the speeding car. Several miles farther on, she saw the deputy had pulled the Thunderbird over, and that he had two men leaning over the back of it. He was attempting to hold them and radio for backup at the same time.
“One of the men got back in the car and tried to escape,” she later told the sheriff’s detectives. “But they stopped him.”
Nevada County Deputy Albert Johnson and Sierra County Deputy David Marshall arrested Mike Hutson, thirty-five, and John Martin, thirty-four, less than a half hour after Kari Lindholm ran to freedom.
Their rented Thunderbird was a treasure trove of evidence. Kari Lindholm’s and Shelly Corelli’s credit and ID cards were all there, solid physical links between the kidnappers and the victims. There were fifteen empty twelve-ounce beer cans, and the remains of the “picnic"—a loaf of Rainbow wholewheat bread and a pack of lunch meat. The beer was Olympia and Miller
High Life, and John and Mike had been even more eclectic in their choice of cigarette brands: Pall Malls, Marlboros, and Kool Lights.
Kari’s nylons were on the floor of the backseat, and her Nordstrom’s sweater, turned inside out.
John Martin and Mike Hutson were taken first to the Sierra County Jail in Downieville, and later transferred back to Solano County to be booked into jail there.
Whatever John’s and Mike’s grievances against a cruel and uncaring world had been before they abducted Kari, they had escalated their troubles through their bumbling, obviously unchoreographed kidnapping. Even so, they were infinitely dangerous, the way a vicious dog is—just because they were so unpredictable. Had Kari Lindholm not taken a chance and run away from John in the campground that was far away from where she was kidnapped, they might well have killed her.
She would always think of what might have happened if the hunters hadn’t stopped for lunch at precisely the time she and her kidnappers were at the campground. Sober, John and Mike went back and forth about what they would do to her. Drunk, they had looked at her with different, colder eyes.
Deputies took Kari to the Sierra Nevada Memorial Miner’s Hospital in Grass Valley for an examination to establish that she had been raped, and to glean what physical evidence there might be. Doctors there brought out a rape kit, and took swabs, washings, and combings from her pubic area and her vaginal vault. They retrieved dark pubic hairs—not her own—and preserved some nonmotile sperm cells. They would help to convict John of raping her.
It was hideously ironic; Kari and her husband had been trying to get pregnant for months without success. And now she was afraid she might be pregnant from the rape.
“If your next period is late,” the ER doctor said, “I think you should take an early pregnancy test.”
She felt sick.
There was no effective antipregnancy pill at the time, and what if she was pregnant with her husband’s baby and didn’t know it yet? If she should prove to have conceived, and chose to have an abortion, she might be killing the baby they had both longed for.
She also dreaded that she had contracted some sexually transmitted disease. The doctor wrote a prescription for a heavy dose of antibiotics just in case. “Keep taking them,” he warned, “until they’re all gone. And, of course, you’ll have to be tested for a number of diseases.”
The meds made her violently ill, and she vomited often. (Long after Kari had recovered somewhat from her initial shock, she continued to have nausea from the prophylactic pills. But when she asked why her rapist couldn’t be tested to see if he had any disease, she was told that wasn’t possible because that would “rob him of his rights to privacy!”)
Back in the world that had seemed safe only the day before, Kari found that everything had changed. She couldn’t go back to the job she loved at Sancho Panza. She was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome so severe that she had to go on disability. She had really never known fear before, but being in the big old house that was Sancho Panza triggered too many memories.
Kari had not become pregnant after being raped, and that was a tremendous relief. She kept taking the meds that would fight STDs and, eventually, got a clean bill of health. John Martin was never tested—which would have saved her months of nausea from the antibiotics.
When Kari failed to conceive, she learned about a baby that might be available for adoption. “That one good thing happened, though,” Kari remembers. “I wasn’t pregnant and I couldn’t get pregnant with my husband. One of the alumnae at Sancho Panza was about to have a baby that she could not keep. We adopted him. He had his problems; he was born with fetal alcohol syndrome because of her drinking, but we never regretted adopting him. We felt blessed to have him. He’s a wonderful boy who overcame so much.”
Unfortunately, Kari and Ben’s good marriage gradually disintegrated, too often one of the tragic aftermaths when a wife has been raped. Some men can cope with it, and others cannot get it out of their minds. Even though they understand intellectually that a forced sexual attack is nothing their wives wanted or caused, some husbands can’t deal with it emotionally. Ben and Kari Lindholm were divorced after eight years of marriage.
“My being raped was a large part of the problem,” she says. “It was a difficult time and we had a tough custody fight over our adopted son—although it’s all right now.”
Kari eventually married again, and with her second husband concieved four children to join her beloved adopted son.
Even so, her trials weren’t over. In 1998, at the age of forty-five, Kari was diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer, which had infiltrated her lymph nodes. Showing the determination and fighting spirit that she had demonstrated during her kidnapping, Kari refused to give up.
“I had three different series of chemo treatments, radiation, and a bone marrow transplant, but I’m now clear of cancer.”
No longer able to work as a crisis counselor because the frightening memories tend to surge back, Kari has another career now. Living far away from the scene of the crimes against her, she still deals with people, but when John Martin and Mike Hutson abducted her, they effectively robbed others in crisis—people much like themselves—of a kind and caring counselor. Violent crime reverberates like the endless aftershocks of the earthquakes that are often felt in Solano County, California.
As for John Martin and Mike Hutson, they were sentenced to very long prison terms. Kari heard that Martin died in prison a few years after she escaped from her kidnappers. She believes Mike Hutson was eventually paroled, but his records have been swallowed up in the vast California criminal justice system.
Although it was Martin who raped Kari, she remembers being more afraid of his quiet partner in crime: “He didn’t say much, and I never knew what he might do, and that was the most frightening thing of all.”
Photographic Insert
THE SEA CAPTAIN
Rolf Neslund, at age forty-five, He was one of the first seamen in the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association, and this photo remains on display in their headquarters in Seattle. It would be fifteen years before he married Ruth Myers.
Rolf and Ruth Neslund sit by the fireplace in their Lopez Island home. Some who knew them said theirs was a love match. Others weren’t so sure.
Rolf and Ruth Neslund’s dream house. They called it “Shangri-La,” but Ruth later called the sprawling rambler overlooking the sea the “Alec Bay Inn,” and ran a successful bed-and-breakfast there. (Seattle Times)
Rolf Neslund in 1979, shortly after he retired as a ship’s pilot. He is sitting on a couch that his wife later replaced. He was a robust man, even as he approached his eightieth birthday.
Rolf Neslund a year before he vanished. He was in great shape for a man of seventy-nine. But his marriage wasn’t doing as well.
Rolf Neslund on his last Christmas. A year later, only a handful of people knew where he was.
Robert Myers, who played a horrifying role in the disappearance of his brother-in-law, Rolf. His sister gave him a boat, and rewarded him in many ways.
Physical evidence gathered by the search team from the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office and the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. It was a large part of the state’s case against Ruth Neslund. Plaintiff’s evidence: shell casings, voodoo doll, jewelry box with Rolf’s favorite cuff links, knives and sheaths, Crete-Nu container, scrapings of dried blood. The Neslund case has become the “Lizzie Borden” mystery of the mystic Northwest. (San Juan Historical Museum)
Evidence, bagged and tagged by San Juan County deputies after many days’ search of Ruth Neslund’s Lopez Island home. Much of it was shocking to island residents who crowded the courtroom at Ruth’s murder trial. (San Juan Historical Museum)
Ruth Neslund’s favorite voodoo doll. (San Juan Historical Museum)
Ruth Neslund seemed remarkably cheerful at one of her court appearances as she is supported on the arm of a deputy. She rather enjoyed her notoriety as the “talk of the San Jua
n Islands.” (Seattle Times)
Robert Keppel, a chief investigator for the Washington State Attorney General’s Criminal Division, worked with Ray Clever to find Rolf Neslund’s blood type in the days before DNA. They were finally able to isolate it from a tissue sample retained after surgery Rolf had. Keppel also helped the sheriff’s department investigators in other aspects of the strange disappearance of a man so well-known in his island community. He now teaches an extremely popular course on homicide at Seattle University.
Ray Clever, right, and other investigators who participated in the days-long search of the Neslunds’ home share a rare moment of laughter. They are sitting on “replacement” furniture purchased shortly after Rolf vanished. Although Ruth claimed they poured liquor from her ample bar, they are drinking only grape pop they had purchased earlier. This room held grisly evidence.
Ruth Neslund detested the San Juan County sheriff’s deputies who searched her house for evidence of foul play in her husband Rolf’s disappearance. It was Joe Caputo who looked up at her living room ceiling and spotted the almost invisible flecks of blood there. And with that, the trail to Rolf’s killer became clear.
Greg Canova, an assistant attorney general for the State of Washington, assisted Charlie Silverman in the prosecution of Ruth Neslund. Ruth hated him. Canova is now a Washington State Supreme Court judge.
Ruth Neslund was stoic when she listened to the verdict at the trial for her husband Rolf’s murder.